Exemplar NEA Questions PDF

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NEA - Coursework
a-level english literature wh=ith example questions to use for own questions...

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Exemplar NEA Questions (you can adapt them to your text) 

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‘A Clockwork Orange is a protest novel about the powerlessness of human beings against ruthless autocratic governments.’ Using ideas from the critical anthology to inform your argument, to what extent do you agree with this view? “The presentation of people, places and events in Heart of Darkness amounts, ultimately, to an outright condemnation of colonialism”. To what extent do you agree with this view of the text? According to Marxist literary criticism the writer is bound by his context and therefore merely translates social facts into literary ones. To what extent is this true of Book 1 of Paradise Lost? Using ideas from the critical anthology to inform your argument, to what extent do you agree with this view? ‘The way we think and the way we experience the world around us are wholly conditioned by the way the economy is organised.’ To what extent could this statement be applied to ___________? ‘In ____________, the writer discourages the stereotype that women can either be a “seductress, an eternally dissatisfied shrew, or cute but essentially helpless.” To what extent do you agree? _________________ maintains characteristics of ‘aesthetic unity, literary language and subject matter’ as well as addressing ‘moral and philosophical topics of importance’; therefore it should retain canonical status. To what extent do you agree? In ______________, how far could it be said that the “distribution of power between male and female [characters] mirrors that of society? ‘In A Clockwork Orange, the use of Alex’s first person narrative lures the reader into a sense of complicity whereby his actions do not seem as shocking and immoral.’ To what extent do you agree? ‘In Fight Club, Chuck Palahnuik presents traditional ideas of gender as destructive.’ To what extent do you agree? To what extent do you agree that Rossetti’s poetry presents a disapproval of capitalist society? ‘Rossetti’s poetry supports ‘the perpetuation of the unequal power relations between men and women’. To what extent do you agree? In ________________, to what extent do you agree that the characters are ‘conditioned by the way the economy is organised’? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays a conflict in ‘humankind’s relationship to the natural world’. To what extent do you agree? Tennyson could not fully convey the struggle of women in the Victorian era as he himself was perpetuating the “unequal power relations between men and women. To what extent do you agree? “Minds aren’t really free, they only think they are.” To what extent do you agree that could be applied to 1984?

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To what extent does Wordsworth’s poetry relate to today’s society in relation to the renewed interest in the ecosystem? The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard is a novel which embodies the concept that humanity is an insignificant force in comparison to nature, and it is ultimately defenceless to its inevitable extinction. To what extent do you agree? ‘The literature of colonial powers is used to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonised as inferior.’ To what extent is this true of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India? “In narratives, what we are not told is just as important as what we are told.” How far do you agree with this in relation to___________? A criticism of ‘Enduring Love’ is that its climax comes in the first chapter and then everything is an anti-climax after that. How far do you agree with this? Victorian independent and free-thinking women were considered doomed, half-mad or despairing. Discuss this view in relation to a feminist reading of Tennyson’s poems. The characters in __________ are undeveloped and are merely there to support the plot. How far do you agree? The poetry of Rudyard Kipling is inherently racist in nature and his opinions are formed largely by the society in which he lived. To what extent do you agree? In Rossetti’s poetry, ‘dependence leads to indulgence and reverence, while independence leads to dislike and rejection’. To what extent do you agree? ‘Far from being repressed, the women in Rossetti’s poems are defiant.’ To what extent do you agree? ‘Female characters in Rossetti’s poems who seek power are condemned.’ To what extent do you agree? How far do you agree that the most painful conflicts in Rossetti’s poems are between women?...